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FATHER IVAN KULIGHIN - RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS THE PRESERVATION OF HUMANITY

C. Ciornea

Abstract

The paper, as the title has announced, proposes a discussion about the religious dimension of Education provided by Father Ivan Kulîghin, major personality. Attempts of his biography to have been reconstituted caused, in time, various controversies. Monk Ivan Kulîghin was born on the 24th of February to Elet (Orel) in Russia. He belonged to one of the greatest spiritual Russian centers, Valaamo Monastery, which after the communism’s installation, had been savagely destroyed by the Soviets. So, the Russian monk had a personal experience of heart’s prayer and thus he could teach the methods and the secrets of this prayer. The presence of Father Ivan Kulîghin proved providential for „The Burning Altar” movement, because at the same time a paradigm of a homo religious was established. His teachings, but especially his acceptance of the supreme sacrifice with dignity prepared his disciples for the feeble accession, on the way to Golgotha, towards deification. Two manuscripts and an icon of the Burning Altar were all wealth that monk John Kulîghin had brought, but these things, trifling by appearance, at the proper time would prove its godly and its mystery value. The Sbornik – an anthology made in Valaamo from the texts of the Russian fathers about the heart’s prayer and its practice – and The Russian Pilgrim (or A Russian Pilgrim’s Sincere Confessions to his confessor regarding the pray of Jesus) were translated, multiplied and spread quickly, in great secret, in dozens of copies. Practically, at the same time with these two manuscripts, we could speak about the beginning of a very efficient Romanian spiritually, way of printing censored works, made in most part by ascetic and mystical texts, by prayers and lives of saints, but also by translations from some Russian philosophers which activated in XVIII–XIX centuries: Homiakov, Berdiaev, ?estov, Florenski, Karsavin, Bulgakov, but also Florovsky and Bakunin. About the attitude of the integrated intellectuals of The Burning Altar, regarding the religious Russian philosophy, those intuited in this a sort of Russian Baroque and that on the authority’s scale only the philocalic tradition had been remained untouched, restituted by Paisie Velicikovski. Ostracized under communist totalitarianism, both secular intellectuals and clerics were aware of their duty to discover the deep spiritual levels of Christianity to provide a possibility to survive as a human beings against the aggression of an aberrant modernity. The question is whether The Burning Altar was already a well-established movement when Sandu Tudor discovered Father Ivan Kulîghin. Romanian historiography contains divergent views regarding this matter. Thus, some believe that we can talk about this move only after the arrival of Russian monk. In our attempt to reconstruct a truthful image of „The Burning Altar” in that time, we combine the documents from the C.N.S.A.S. (National Council for Studying the Security Archives) archive with memoirs but also with the interview of the only person who, nowadays, can testify about what the prayer of the heart meant for students, but also for „the elders” who belonged to this spiritual movement - Father Nicolae Borda?iu.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2017/34/S13.028

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